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Liz goes to… The London next gen testing conference – 26th June 2014

Its the second edition of Liz goes to….

Its theme was to find out what the next generation of testers would be doing and how software development is changing.

This blog posts theme is linking, so I will try to provide links to interesting stuff where I can.

The one thing I took away from the day is that in order to keep up with competitors we need to react to change fast, deliver changes and understand the risks of those to help make decisions. Making smaller more achievable goals that we can adapt to as we go will decrease the risk. CI, automation (specifically unit testing), fast feedback from A/B testing are all part of this.

David Snowden has some pretty controversial views, so if you like controversy like I dogoogle him.

Studying the way humans react to the internet and how quickly things change. We adapt without even knowing!

He explained that having too much structure can mean we take longer to adapt to change. Forcing specific requirements is great for efficiency but it gives no time to adapt and repurpose something that is already alive We need to react fast to constantly evolve. Its common now to try to replicate something you like, but as its the end point of a revolutionary process you need to understand the why before scaling the how.

Exaptation requires time for redundancy and efficiency, so being 100% efficient can cause problems as teams have no time to adapt and innovate.

The tools we use change our cognitive processes and we become dependent on them. Don’t manage things you don’t need to manage. e.g Internet Explorer 6!

Another one that if you haven’t watched him on You Tube is worth a watch. Dans brief was to argue against all the points in the previous talks, plus to give his views about the future of the testing role.

Testing is the future!

Testing is to be more collaborative. Collaboration brings individual blind spots to foreground – quality improves!

Dan disagreed that testing is an activity. He described it as a mindset and its testers jobs to guide others how to use this mindset.

Taking risks

Getting fast feedback is about taking risks. We can’t all test everything so we focus our efforts where they are needed the most

All risks have an impact and likelihood and the tendency is just to fix all the high things, but with risk we need to think about the context of it too. Every risk will have a completely different context depending on the stakeholder.

Taking risks will allow for faster feedback and therefor more innovation and exaptation. The quicker we get feedback the quicker we can react to it!

Automation is a key in making these risks smaller as it provides fast feedback. Building safely in with reduces risk.

Rather idealistically he described how a change was A/B tested without hours and refactored based on user feedback.

100% efficiency

He also agreed with Dave Snowden saying that ‘People with time invent things’ Becoming too focused on burndown charts and story points can actually be counter productive

Cognitive bias

Dan explained how testers need to use cognitive bias to aid questioning of requirements. Its a tendency to only agree with things in your world view, especially after being given some really rigid requirements or being sold an idea and testers are really good at thinking of the things no one else can.

We are normally thinking about the selective reality as the what we class as unnecessary points are already removed. This can lead to false assumptions, so its always good to question.

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure’

T S Eliot

Net a Porter’s Mobile testing tips

Mobile testing is a complete minefield. So many devices to choose from, so knowing business aim helps testing focus.

Net a porter shared their mobile app testing tips:

Date and time settings modify the app time – we don’t want to be sending people reminders at 2am!

Languages settings

keyboard settings

Location settings

Network settings – 3g, wifi, wifi authentication (like on the tube)

Native share

Test Non retina devices

Privacy settings – Don’t let the app use the camera, what would happen etc

Storing data

Uninstalling

Fragmentation of devices is tricky, try to pick the most common ones.

Performance is super important – make sure this is in your definition of done!

If the app crashes or is slow, people will react badly to it.

Other bits

Automated Testing

I talked to a number of people about automated testing and its value.

Everyone agreed that unit testing is fundamental as they are quick to run and give us some level of confidence, but did question how valuable UI testing is as it can be incredibly time consuming to maintain, especially if you try to test more than basic functionality.

It took me back to the agile testing pyramid and the fact that we should be unit testing more.

Api testing

Net a porter spoke about their approach to API testing

They unit test all the core parameters and manually test using soap opera scenarios using a REST client.

Technical Testers

There is loads online at the moment about testers needing to be developers to stay in ‘agile’. Today is so easy to learn online, so we talked that upskilling will have value but that testers are also useful elsewhere in an agile team. The role of tester will become a lot more collaborative with other members of the team and guiding others about quality.